Marion Team competes at MakeOHI/O

March 6, 2017

A group of Ohio State Marion students from the campus's winning engineering roller coaster design team competition recently competed in MakeOHI/O 2017 the weekend of March 4th and 5th in Knowlton Hall on the Columbus Campus. Representing Ohio State Marion on the Marion Makethon team were Xavier Gregory, Daniel Van Dyke, and former Marion campus and current Columbus campus student Adam Klim .

MakeOHI/O is a 24-hour hardware-oriented hackathon where students come together to create something amazing! The event featured over $1,000 in prizes awarded, but participants felt what they learned was the most valuable part of the experience.

"This opportunity provided our team a real world application in overcoming setbacks." explained VanDyke. "It also delivered a deeper understanding of the physics behind our project," he added.

Doing a project like this, said Gregory, illustrates, "what we learn in class is completely applicable to outside the classroom."

"These are skills you can take wherever you go." he explained.

The Marion team didn't place at the competition, but their creation, which charged a mini-drone using a converted microwave oven and a small antenna did actually work. The project's use of RF radiation to power the drone was deemed unsafe at the competition, but the team rebounded from their setback by creating another form of wireless charge utilizing inductive coupling, which is the near field wireless transmission of electrical energy between magnetically coupled coils.

"The team used ingenuity to come up with a different charging idea," explained team advisor, Dr. Chris Orban, an associate professor of physics at Ohio State Marion.

Orban hopes to send a team to the event in 2018. In the meantime, the group is considering writing up the project and submitting it for publication in "The Physics Teacher," a monthly scientific magazine produced by the American Association for Physics Teachers (AAPT).

Company event sponsors were impressed with the design and ingenuity of the team's project.